The Double X Economy

International Women’s Day Lecture

For fifteen years, scholar and activist Linda Scott has played a central role in the rise of the women’s economic empowerment movement. A coalition made up of activists, multinational corporations, global NGOs, and governments, this new form of feminism arose in response to emerging nation-level data sets demonstrating that economic gender inequality is a worldwide problem with a distinctive pattern in every country. A consistent set of exclusionary mechanisms holding women back drags down national economies and fosters global crises, from severe poverty to human trafficking.

In The Double X Economy: The Epic Potential of Women’s Empowerment, Scott argues that women’s systematic exclusion from economic participation has created an alternate economy that she calls “the Double X Economy”—a 360 degree prison that shuts women out of economic participation in domains well beyond employment, a situation captured by neither capitalist nor socialist theories. These severe exclusions have been applied throughout history, shaping women into an entirely different economic ethic and practice. Yet, when the women’s economy is empowered, it is more careful, cooperative, and focused on positive long-term outcomes than the economic order under which the world lives now.

The Double X Economy presents an entirely new vision of women’s rights, based on economic liberty. It’s an assessment of women’s historic subjugation, an evidence-based demonstration of how that subjugation has resulted in myriad intractable problems, and a call to action to once and for all place women on an equal footing with men.